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Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

Ok, so what's the actionable take here? Are people going to use this to try and push wealth redistribution and authoritarian controls which is about the only thing I've ever seen from "climate action" types? Or does this imply those wouldn't work anyway now? Is anyone or any government going to look at actual motivations to help live in a warmer place? And/or to pull carbon out of the air, or get more nuclear, or whatever else we need to keep living normally?

It's going to be hard to get people to care about this if the takeaway is going to be "other people have to do what we say" as it usually is with climate stuff.

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> It's going to be hard to get people to care about this if the takeaway is going to be "other people have to do what we say"

The poor collectively decide they want clean air and the rich shriek "stop telling other people what to do!" Then the rich turn around and say "stay off my land, and don't you dare occupy my 3rd vacation home even though it's empty right now!"

The point I'm trying to make here is that telling other people what to do is foundational to many of our most basic rights. Do not kill people, do not trespass on other people's property, do not copy my copyrighted works, do not infringe my patents, etc. These things are so basic they are taken for granted and overlooked. Notably, they benefit those who already have wealth. But then, if the poor say "do not destroy the air" or something like that, suddenly the wealthy are concerned about telling other people what to do.

In my past experience the poor I know are saying, "I would like to be able to afford gas to drive to work, and have a workplace that treats me with dignity and afford a good night on the town a few times a year."

I'd love to know which poor folks you know who have time to worry about global warming.

That's generally how things must work. If a bunch of companies are polluting a river with industrial waste because if they don't, they won't remain competitive and profitable with the other companies that do, the solution is to regulate that no, you can't dump your industrial waste in the river. Is that "authoritarian"?

How do you suggest paying for climate mitigation, carbon capture, or nuclear power? Those must be paid for by government since they aren't profitable. The rich have the money, and have benefited the most from carbon emissions.

How do you suggest reducing carbon emissions that aren't profitable? We are lucky that wind and solar cost less than other forms of energy, but at some point we will have to pay people to switch to electric cars and then make ICE cars illegal.

Dealing with climate change means everybody needs to stop producing carbon dioxide and pay to pump it back out of the atmosphere. Only government can do that.

I'd recommend looking up a few things: how much private wealth is invested in fossil fuel industries, how much carbon extraction costs, how much money is spent subsidizing fossil fuels, how much money is spent on renewable sources of energy, and then speculate on how to fund it. "get more nuclear" is ok, for whatever it means.

>It's going to be hard to get people to care about this if the takeaway is going to be "other people have to do what we say" as it usually is with climate stuff.

Eh, more like hold the ultra-wealthy accountable for profiteering off, or at the expense of, the planet? and the (comfortable) existence of lots of people based on how things are going?

(The really cool thing is, most (all?) of the individual climate-shaming is propaganda from corporations who know damn well that individuals contribute very little to climate change compared to corporations themselves and the wealthy capital class.)

> The report finds that these billionaires’ investments give an annual average of 3m tonnes of CO2e per person, which is a million times higher than 2.76 tonnes of CO2e which is the average for those living in the bottom 90 percent.

Yes, I understand that's via investment, but that's still kinda precisely my point. Why shouldn't they be held to account?

> only thing I've ever seen from "climate action" types

Not surprised. This topic should go across political spectrum. Unfortunately for several decades, instead of proposing solutions, right spectrum was denying that there is problem.

> Ok, so what's the actionable take here?

The unthinkable yet true thing is that there isn't anything we can do to reverse or cure the situation. Best we can do is try to adapt. We're far past the tipping points. Ever heard of Collapse with a capital C?

> Best we can do is try to adapt.

Ok well let's do that then instead scream about the crazy stuff many sibling comments are advocating. All this rearranging the deck chair on the titanic stuff is just transparently political.

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